Page 4 - MGATODAY-Spr17-web

By Sheron Smith
Mounds, Monuments and Mysteries
MGA History Professor Dr. Matt Jennings
studies the long, rich history of Macon’s
Ocmulgee National Monument, perhaps
soon to become the first national historic
park in Georgia.
Matt Jennings saw Ocmulgee National
Monument for the first time in 2000
when, as a graduate student in
History at the University of Illinois, he attended
an archeological conference at the ancient Native
American site in east Macon.
“I had heard of it and probably read about
it before, but seeing it was amazing,” he says. “I
thought it was extraordinary to have a place like
that in the middle of a city.”
Seven years later, as a newly minted Ph.D,
Jennings began his search for a teaching job in
higher education. One of his interviews was at
what is now Middle Georgia State University
(MGA).
While he likes to think he could have built his
academic career no matter where he landed,
Macon and MGA immediately felt like the right
place to be, in part because of the access he would his recently released Ocmulgee National
have to what is often referred to locally as “the
Indian Mounds.”
“The story of Ocmulgee National Monument
hasn’t been fully told,” Jennings says, recalling
when he first saw a timeline poster of the site’s
history that did not extend beyond the 1820s. “I
wanted to be part of telling more of the story.”
Now, as an MGA associate professor of
History, Jennings is a prominent figure in the
community of scholars studying Ocmulgee
National Monument as its story continues to
unfold. His ongoing research includes exploring
the relationship between Native American peoples
and the mounds at Ocmulgee, as well as the inter-
twined history of tourism and archaeology at the
site. He is among the voices encouraging Congress
to elevate ONM to national historic park status, a
4 MIDDLE GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY
promotion from “monument” that could raise the
site’s visibility and pay off in tangible economic
benefits for the city and surrounding region.
In January 2017, the U.S. House of
Representatives passed a bill to expand Ocmulgee
and designate it as Georgia’s first national historic
park. As of early spring, advocates of the status
change were waiting on the Senate to act on the
bill, which if passed would nearly quadruple the
site’s current acreage to 2,800 and change its name
to “Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park.”
“Those changes would add a layer of
protection from commercial and residential
development and, at the same time, pave the way
for a study regarding setting aside a huge swath
of green space between Macon and Hawkinsville
for a variety of recreational uses,” Jennings says.
“I’m not an expert in economic development, but
those in the know project that within 15 years the
park and preserve could support as many as 2,800
jobs and inject millions into the regional
economy.”
What makes Ocmulgee so historically
significant? Here’s how Jennings described it in
Monument, one of the books in the “Images of
America” series published by Arcadia:
People have called the land near the Ocmulgee
River in present-day central Georgia home for
a long time, perhaps as many as 17,000 years,
and each successive group has left its mark on
the landscape. Mississippian-era people erected
the towering Great Temple Mound and other
large earthworks around 1,000 years ago. In
the late 17th century, Ocmulgee flourished as a
center of trade between the Creek Indians and
their English neighbors. In the 19th century,
railroads did irreparable damage to the site in
the name of progress and profit, slicing through
it twice. Preservation efforts bore fruit in the
1930s, when Ocmulgee National Monument
Continued on page 6